• Ma.gnolia Data is Gone For Good

    February 19th, 2009 : Rich Miller

    The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia reports that all of its user data was irretrievably lost in the Jan. 30 database crash that knocked the service offline. That means that users who were unable to recover their bookmarks through publicly available tools (including other social media sites and the Google cache) have lost all their data.

    Ma.gnolia founder Larry Halff said last week that the service’s MySQL database included nearly half a terabyte of data. Yesterday Halff informed users that a specialist had been unable to recover any data from the corrupted hard drive. ”Unfortunately, database file recovery has been unsuccessful and I won’t be able to recover members’ bookmarks from the Ma.gnolia database,” he wrote.

    Halff recently recorded a podcast with Chris Messina in which he discussed the database crash and the lessons to be found for other startups in Ma.gnolia’s experience. The primary lesson: don’t try to do everything yourself. “I made a huge mistake in how I set up my (backup) system,” Halff said.

    It turns out that Ma.gnolia was pretty much a one-man operation, running on two Mac OS X servers and four Mac minis. A clear lesson for users is not to assume that online services have lots of staff, lots of servers and professional backups, and to keep your own copies of your data, especially on free services. 

    Halff has won some admirersf or his handling of the aftermath of the database crash, but there are also many users who have been critical of Ma.gnolia’s operations.  ”It has not been an easy two weeks, but … the community reaction has really affirmed my faith in humanity,” Halff wrote in a comment on a summary by Todd Sieling.

[...] a good job of maintaining it. This became more evident than ever following Ma.gnolia’s recent database crash that caused the company to loose 500 GB of user generated [...]

Web roundup « MySQLTalk.com

Posted February 19th, 2009

[...] to hear that Ma.gnolia lost all their data. A good DBA and backup strategy is vital to the success of any [...]

Rob Scott

Posted February 19th, 2009

Wow – pretty big for a oe man band, but given how critical his information was (it IS his business, right!) I cannot believe his database can crash and wipe everything. Its pretty rudimentary, really. I’d be surprised if many stay loyal given the potential for causing majorheadaches that a bookmarking site going pop has.

[...] keep reading that Ma.gnolia’s data is permanently lost because “a specialist had been unable to recover any data from the corrupted hard [...]

[...] Source Tags : Backup, Disaster recovery [...]

Chris | Healthy Gaming

Posted February 20th, 2009

Ouch… Isn’t part of a backup strategy to sometimes attempt a recovery from a backup, on a test system?

jeff

Posted February 20th, 2009

@Chris I think the live system was the test system… doh

robert.schuppenies.de - weblog

Posted February 20th, 2009

[...] Ma.gnolia Data is Gone For Good [...]

Ma.gnolia Data is Gone For Good

Posted February 22nd, 2009

[...] Ma.gnolia Data is Gone For Good « Data Center Knowledge.   [...]

Anon

Posted February 23rd, 2009

The huge mistake was not testing a restore from the backup system.

[...] fact is accidents occur- look at what happened to Ma.gnolia at least in (mt)’s case no data was lost. I think the ugly truth is that customers who [...]

[...] Ce dernier rebondissement dans le monde des services web populaires nous ramène à la question de la confiance apportée à ce genre de sites. Et oui, parce que quand ce n’est pas Facebook qui a un problème avec le stockage de ses photos, c’est Gmail qui ne fonctionne pas pendant plusieurs heures, ou encore Ma.gnolia qui perd un teraoctet de données. [...]

[...] Si è saputo poi che l’intero servizio, benché consistesse di circa mezzo Terabyte di dati, girava soltanto su due server Mac OS X con il supporto di 4 Mac mini. E il backup, a quanto pare, era a [...]

[...] host computers suffered a database crash, irretrievably losing all the site’s data, according to Data Center Knowledge. The Ma.gnolia site, which was apparently hosted on two Mac OS X servers and four Mac minis, now [...]

I don’t trust the cloud - popcorn.cx

Posted August 15th, 2009

[...] every couple of weeks that something happens to compromise user data. A couple that I noted were Ma.gnolia losing their database, Bloglines being neglected after being sold, Google dropping services, Kodak chaning their terms of [...]

Get me out of here! « Netcultures

Posted October 6th, 2009

[...] it’s somewhat safe from malicious attacks, but even then, it’s still vulnerable to plain old hardware failure and general cockups. And the most vulnerable data of all is the data that is hosted on bottom-end [...]

[...] it is GMail, Tmobile losing Sidekick data, Ma.gnolia database crashes, or Coghead going out of business, any failure of an off-premise solution seems to feed the myth [...]

[...] it is GMail, Tmobile losing Sidekick data, Ma.gnolia database crashes, or Coghead going out of business, any failure of an off-premise solution seems to feed the myth [...]

[...] Ce dernier rebondissement dans le monde des services web populaires nous ramène à la question de la confiance apportée à ce genre de sites. Et oui, parce que quand ce n’est pas Facebook qui a un problème avec le stockage de ses photos, c’est Gmail qui ne fonctionne pas pendant plusieurs heures, ou encore Ma.gnolia qui perd un teraoctet de données. [...]

[...] at DreamBank learned that the hard way. Jeff’s learning that the hard way today. Ma.gnolia learned that the hard way (though it’s probably more accurate to say we all re-learned it). But maybe you don’t [...]

Add Your Comments

    RESOURCE LINKS:

ARCHIVED ARTICLES

All Content on Data Center Knowledge
© 2009 Miller Webworks LLC
All Rights Reserved